Lisa Simeone's blog

Media outlets keep pushing misleading headlines and people keep repeating false reports that "the scanners are being removed from airports." No, they're not.As I wrote last Friday, only the scanners manufactured by Rapiscan are being removed from U.S. airports (they were never used in the EU, where they are banned).

On her last four trips through U.S. airport security, Anita Nagelis says she’s been pulled aside and subjected to a more thorough search by TSA agents, including an aggressive pat-down.

Nagelis, who works for a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., doesn’t know why. She never set off a metal detector, isn’t on a no-fly list, and no suspicious items are ever discovered in her luggage.

Friend of the blog NJR, about whom I wrote on December 18th, is on a roll. This guy is hilarious (in a good way, not in the way that the TSA is hilarious). And because he’s a former screener, he has more authority when it comes to telling you what we critics have been telling you for years, which is fine by me. Whatever it takes to get through to the masses.

Nadine Kay Hays is back in court. Hays is the woman who was arrested, handcuffed, strip-searched, and jailed after the TSA decided she was too uppity. Hays had been escorting her ill, 93-year-old mother through security at the Burbank airport in 2009 when the TSA decided to confiscate the applesauce and yogurt the elderly woman needed to eat during the journey. In trying to retrieve her stolen items, Hays was accused by the TSA of hitting an agent. Prosecutors later charged her with battery.

A South Korean woman visiting this country and, of course, having no idea that she was required to undergo physical assault as a condition of getting on a plane, was arrested at Orlando International Airport.

A former New Jersey cop who, colleagues said, routinely disparaged blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Indians, and women found a hearty embrace by the TSA at his local airport.

Former Edison, NJ police sergeant Alex Glinsky retired last year on the taxpayers’ dime ($84,000 a year) after having spent a career abusing John and Jane Citizen. Then he looked for a second career — with the TSA.

A Merry Christmas to our readers, writers, and lovers of civil liberties everywhere! Thanks to you, TSA News is growing and gaining new readers daily. Thanks to you, more people are learning about the behavior of this criminal agency and how they can fight it. Thanks to you, we’re in a long line of crusaders in this country for social justice. So here’s hoping you have a happy day during this festive season, a season of light.

Matthew Mosk, Angela Hill, and Timothy Fleming write for ABC about gaping holes in airline “security,” thanks to the hamburger clerks working “security” at the airports, with test bombs and guns being missed by screeners 20 out of 22 times at Newark.

In a recent interview, TSA Administrator John Pistole acknowledged that his agency has been less than embraced by the public, and he again promised, as he has for two years now, to focus on improving passengers’ experience with TSA screening. In that interview Pistole said that it has become an adversarial relationship, “so what we’re trying to do through all these initiatives is change that paradigm and make this a partnership.”

While lawsuits continue to be filed against the TSA on a variety of fronts, generally the TSA has been successful in foiling any and all efforts to make it accountable or to even reveal its statistics. Also, generally, the TSA does this by sheer obfuscation and technicality. I must admit, that is a strategy. However, without the antagonist tiring and simply going away, that strategy usually eventually fails.

Nothing will wipe a grin off your face faster than a squad of Navy SEALs rappelling into your anonymous compound from a Black Hawk. But while Osama Bin Laden is dead and gone, and unable to mock America’s clumsy efforts to protect its planes from our Homeland-fueled fantasies, his disciples are more than capable of laughing at us.

As we’ve reported many times, the TSA’s so-called explosive detection devices routinely alarm on ordinary, everyday things. Have you been working in your garden? Oops. You might have specks of fertilizer on you. Do you use hand or body lotions? Oops. There’s glycerin in them thar things. All those can get you hauled aside as a potential terrorist. Because fertilizer and glycerin show up as “bomb-making residue.”

Yesterday we reported on the latest TSA theft. If it sounded familiar, in more ways than one, it isn’t just a case of déjà vu. The only thing more consistent than TSA thefts in recent years is the agency’s hollow statements about TSA worker integrity and agency standards.

(Editor's Note: Sommer Gentry is a math professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.)

I was pleased recently to receive an email from Russell Wooten, the IT Strategy Branch Chief of the TSA. His email reached me through my membership in the Maryland chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). For the uninitiated, operations research is the discipline of applying advanced analytical techniques to help make better decisions. Mr. Wooten was soliciting input on these questions:

On December 29, 2012 Politico reported that Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas) was chosen to be the next chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, succeeding Peter King (R-N.Y.), who stepped down in November.

There are those who might believe that anyone opposed to the TSA has a problem with authority. And/or they hate all law enforcement. Well, sorry to tell you, but that is simply untrue. I am here today to laud the actions of one Deputy Sheriff Stan Lenic of Albany, New York.

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